Sing me a bawdy song, make me merry

KNEES OVER TOES, DAMMIT

As a part of my Magical Girl project, I've been doing a long and involved series of analyses of Magical Girl henshins. While doing these analyses, I’ve stumbled across an alarming trend regarding Magical Girl posture. Observe these four pictures:

Oh my god. I mean, oh my god. Looking at these four is causing me physical pain. I swear, it’s like nails on a chalkboard over here. Mercury in particular — if I look at her pose much longer, I may need to hurl.

Girls... why are you standing like that?!? Dear lord, don’t you know how terrible that is for your knees? Horrible! Awful! Disastrous! When you stand with bent knees, you have to make sure that your knees are hovering parallel over your feet, not slumping together in the middle. Every dance teacher I ever had drilled this into me from day one: Knees over toes! Knees over toes!

Also, y’all are supposed to be badass superheroes, yes? How do you expect to fight the forces of evil if you’re starting off with a crappy stance like that? With your feet splayed out, your knees relaxed, and your weight all sunk down in the center, this is not a stance conducive to running or jumping at a moment’s notice. Not very good for fighting life-or-death battles. Also not very intimidating, since it makes you look like you need to pee.

The only explanation I can think of for this is that the animators subscribed to the old “proper ladies don’t spread their legs” cliché. To which I would reply: these girls are superheroes who fight monsters on a daily basis while wearing miniskirts. They are the very antithesis of proper-lady-ness. So please let them stand in a more practical fashion.